Staying afloat

A few years ago, Trey Pitsenberger sold his multi-million-dollar garden center to his partners and went to Garden Valley, Calif., to start a similar type of nursery – right as the market started collapsing.

“We just got nailed,” he says.

To stay afloat, his wife opened up a daycare while he continued to try to make the garden center successful. Everything was slow, but he started to notice hydroponics stores, which specialize in growing supplies for cannabis growers, popping up everywhere in the area.

“California is basically in a depression out here, and the only place anyone was making any money was with our No. 1 crop, cannabis,” says the owner of The Golden Gecko Garden Center. “It’s the No. 1 crop – higher than wheat, cotton, apples, anything else – so all these stores started opening up to cover that market to capture some of that business, meanwhile the small mom-and-pop garden centers were going out of business.”

He was curious how all these stores could open and stay open when the economy seemed to be taking its toll on so many other centers, so he paid a visit.

“I walked into one of those places in winter time, and they were making sales like you wouldn’t believe in winter,” he says. “I thought, ‘God, why am I letting this business go?’”

So he started bringing in a few of those items to his store. These were items you wouldn’t find at a traditional box store or garden center because most don’t want to associate with that particular market, but growing cannabis is legal with a permit in California, so there’s a market for it.

“I started bringing things in, and I found out that the really progressive thinkers in horticulture were actually in the hydroponic market because there’s money there, and people are serious, and they really wanted to know how to grow things,” he says.

On top of that, the organic movement started to explode at the same time, and box stores don’t address that movement very much either.

“Between the organic market exploding, the hydroponic market and the fact that what we were doing before wasn’t working, we decided to start going where the money was,” says Pitsenberger.

“We jumped into that market and now I balanced it all out so I got this kind of hybrid nursery now where I have a selection of fertilizers you will not find in a conventional garden center.”

A couple of the products he started carrying were fabric containers that allow the roots to breathe better, as well as bat guano or manure. He also sells fertilizers that contain no animal-derived products for organic growing as well as cold-processed seaweed.

“Everyone’s always complaining, ‘Home Depot has Miracle-Gro, and I want to carry [a name-brand fertilizer,] and how am I going to compete with their prices?’” he says. “I tell people, ‘Screw [that name-brand fertilizer] – don’t even compete with it. Carry something different.”

Pitsenberger recognizes that California is definitely different than someplace like, say Connecticut, but the principle is the same – find something unique that you can hook people with to create a loyal customer base because they can’t get the product anywhere else.

“A lot of my friends in the business, when they find out about this stuff and try it, they realize, ‘Wow, I had a market for this, and I never even knew it,’” he says.

Pitsenberger also recognizes that the hydroponic market or other specialty supplies may also turn off some of his established customer base, but he sees it as a solution to an even bigger problem and is willing to take that chance.

“I might have gone too far into the hydro market last year or the year before and lost some of the little old ladies who used to shop here because maybe they thought, ‘Oh, he has all those dreadlocked hippie people in there.’ But then I’m thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. The industry is constantly moaning about ‘Where are the young people?’ and I’m sitting here standing at my counter, and I have guys like Bob Marley waiting in line. The young people are standing here waiting at my counter.”

Hydroponics accounts for about 30 to 40 percent of Pitsenberger’s business, so it hasn’t taken over everything. Instead it makes him more well-rounded and appealing to a wider customer base.

“Now I’m more of a garden center for everybody,” he says. “… I have everything you need for anything you want to grow at your house.”

As customers come in looking for some of the specialty products he sells, they’re starting to gain interest in other aspects of growing as well.

“[People say] ‘You have vegetables? This is cool,’” he says. “I had a guy come in, and he bought $80 worth of seed. I said, ‘You’re already growing, so why don’t you use your skills to grow food for your family too?’”

That customer came back a couple months later with pictures to show Pitsenberger and was ecstatic at all the vegetable plants he had grown.

As business has picked up, he’s also been able to add back more of the traditional ornamentals that had been slower in recent years because when people come in for one product, they’re seeing other things and buying those as well.

“Now it’s finally gotten to the point that the small mom-and-pop stores that survived have seen, ‘Hey we need to start carrying some of that stuff, so we can capture some of that market,’” he says. “By doing that you bring in people to the garden center that perhaps have never been in a garden store before ... These are people that might have gotten into gardening for one reason, and now, because I’ve got all these beautiful flowers and trees and shrubs and vegetables when you walk through my back door, they’re discovering a whole new aspect of gardening.”

Kristy J. O’Hara is editor of Greenhouse Management magazine, a GIE Media publication.